How to Get Your Business on Snapchat in Four Steps

Creating a Snapchat marketing plan helps ensure you’ll gain a significant return on the amount of time you invest in the platform.

In this article, you’ll discover a four-step plan to get your business started on Snapchat.

Discover how you can get your business started on Snapchat in four steps.

#1: Decide What Type of Content to Post

First, you’ll need to decide what type of content you want to post on Snapchat. Snapchat content can be broken down into two core areas: value-added content and storytelling content.

Value-added Content

Value-added content provides relevant, helpful information that focuses on educating your audience and adding value. Here are some examples that you can incorporate in your own Snapchat marketing:

Teach your audience how to complete a specific task or tactic. Think about tactics you’ve used or activities you’ve completed in your business that have helped you achieve your objectives.

For example, suppose one of your key objectives was to use your time more efficiently. One tactic that helped you do this was to set up an IFTTT (If This Than That) recipe to automatically post relevant content to your social media accounts via updates from an RSS feed. Since this tactic saved you a ton of time, you can share the steps to do it with your Snapchat audience.

Share relevant tutorials on your Snapchat story.

Show your audience how to use new and innovative industry tools. Again, think about the tools you use in your business that provide the most value. Share these tools on Snapchat and tell your audience how to use them.

For example, BuzzSumo recently launched a great Google Chrome plugin with some really cool features. Jump on Snapchat and tell your audience about it.

For example, a great way to increase exposure is to add your social media links to your email signature. Share this actionable tip with your audience.

Share relevant tips on your Snapchat story.

Share industry updates. This provides value to your audience, positions you as an expert, and increases your credibility.

For example, if you’re a marketer, you might talk about Facebook’s recent Messenger app update.

Share industry updates on your Snapchat story.

Gala Gil shares the latest industry updates on Snapchat. She does a daily social media marketing news roundup commenting on the latest stories and social media updates.

Gala Gil shares social media marketing news on her Snapchat.

Storytelling Content

Consumers buy from companies they consider to be credible, trustworthy, and honest. If your business isn’t telling its story online with these three important factors, your target audience will likely buy from your competitors.

Storytelling content can show people a look behind the scenes at your company. Here are some storytelling content ideas you can use in your Snapchat marketing:

Showcase your company culture and values to help build consumer trust. Buffer regularly shares individual stories of their team in day-in-the-life scenarios.

Give your audience a glimpse into your business and personal life. When deciding what content to share, think about whether your Snapchat audience will find it interesting. Also, consider whether the video portrays you and your company in a good light. Finally, is this content different from what you post on other social media platforms?

Jamal Edwards shares exclusive content on Snapchat from his successful music and entertainment business. He gives his Snapchat audience a look at new music before it’s published on any other platform.

Jamal Edwards shares behind-the-scenes footage of DJs and artists on his Snapchat.

Share a story focused on an event you’re attending or hosting. This will help you tell your brand’s story, and add value at the same time. Try to plan your Snapchat content in three areas surrounding the event:

#2: Grow a Targeted Audience

Snapchat helps you gain exposure and grow your business. Here are some creative ways you can do that.

Leverage Other Platforms

Leveraging audiences you’ve built on other social platforms is a great way to grow your Snapchat audience. First, ensure you’re sharing unique content on your Snapchat story to give people a reason to follow you.

From there, download your story, share it on other social platforms, and provide a link to your Snapchat profile. To do that, go to your Snapchat story and tap the download button.

Download your Snapchat story.

Next, swipe down from the camera screen and tap Add Friends.

Tap Add Friends.

Next, tap Share Username, and then tap Copy.

Tap Share Username and share relevant tips on your Snapchat story.

Finally, upload the Snapchat story video to other platforms and paste the profile link you copied from your Snapchat.

Share your Snapchat story on other platforms.

Do a Social Media Search

Another way to grow your Snapchat audience is to use social media search.

Next, search for “Add me on Snapchat” and fill in search boxes relevant to your target audience. For example, if you’re targeting people in a certain location, fill in the Places section.

Search “Add me on Snapchat.”

Now add Snapchatters and engage. Send them a snap to introduce yourself, ask them a question, comment on their stories via a direct message, and so forth.

Add relevant Snapchat users and introduce yourself.

Use GhostCodes

GhostCodes is a discovery app for Snapchat that helps you gain exposure and grow your Snapchat audience. You can create your profile, choose a category you want to be included in, and find other Snapchatters to follow based on those categories.

People can give you hearts and download your snapcode directly from the app. In addition, users are ranked by the number of hearts they have.

To get started on GhostCodes, first download the GhostCodes app. Then tap the settings icon to set up your profile.

Set up your GhostCodes profile.

Now you can use the app to find other relevant Snapchat users, give them hearts, and download their snapcodes.

Use the app to find relevant Snapchat users.

Send them a snap to introduce yourself.

Run Competitions

Competitions are another way to grow your Snapchat audience. Remember to let your audience know that they need to follow you to enter the competition. Sharing a link to your Snapchat profile via the competition will make it easier for people to enter.

Gleam lets you create more complex competitions by allowing an infinite number of actions that users can take to enter. One of the options is to follow you on Snapchat. Gleam will create a cool competition widget that you can embed on your website.

Think outside the box! For example, promote your Snapcode on your business card.

#3: Engage Your Audience

Remember to engage with your audience, because it’s a crucial part of converting followers into customers. As part of your Snapchat marketing plan, write down how you’ll do this.

Here are some ways to engage with your audience:

Ask questions. Questions are a simple but effective way to engage your audience. When you ask questions, make sure they’re meaningful, and then promptly reply to anyone who responds.

There are a variety of questions you could ask your audience. For example, ask them what they think about what you’ve discussed in your story, ask them to vote on something (e.g., logo designs), or ask them for feedback (e.g., on a video you created).

Carlos Gil consistently asks great questions on Snapchat. He focuses on social media marketing, business, tech, entrepreneurship, and more.

Carlos Gil asks lots of relevant questions on Snapchat.

Engage proactively with other users. This is one of the best ways to drive instant engagement. Use GhostCodes to find relevant Snapchat users, watch their stories, and send them a snap answering their questions. Sparking conversation starts the relationship-building process.

Entice users to create snaps and send them to you. Feature them on your Snapchat story. Make sure to tell your audience to download the snap and send the video to you via email so you can replay your favorites and record the videos to add to your Snapchat.

Shonduras posted a Snapchat boxing match and asked his audience to send in boxing snaps. Thousands of people sent in snaps!

#4: Measure Performance

To drive results and continuous improvement through Snapchat, you have to measure your Snapchat performance. It’s crucial. There are four key metrics you can focus on within your Snapchat analytics, plus one additional tool you can use to measure website traffic from Snapchat.

Total Story Completions

Total story completions is the number of people who have viewed your story from start to finish. You’ll find this number next to the most recent video in your story.

Measure your total story completions.

Unique Views

The total unique views metric represents the number of people who have opened up the first frame in your Snapchat story for at least a second. To find it, look at the number of people who opened the first snap of a story every 24 hours.

Measure your unique views.

Story Completion Ratio

Story completion ratio is the percentage of people who watched your whole story compared to the people who started watching your story but didn’t finish it. This metric is important because a low story completion ratio means your content is not appealing to your audience enough to keep them watching. This shows you what content is performing well.

You can work out this ratio with the following equation:

(Total Story Completions / Number of Views on First Story Video) x 100

For example, the story completion ratio for the screenshot above is:

(69 / 75) x 100 = 92%

Screenshots

Screenshots are a good way to measure engagement, and you can find this metric below the unique views. You can use screenshots to gain audience insights (such as asking your audience to take screenshots of their favorite logo design from a variety), to link to new blogs (discussed in more detail below), and for discount voucher codes.

Measure your screenshots.

Website Traffic

Website traffic is one of the most important metrics to measure the ROI of your Snapchat efforts. The best way to measure website traffic from Snapchat is to create unique website links to share on your Snapchat story. You can then measure and analyze the performance of these individual links.

Bitly is a free tool you can use to create, share, and measure custom links. First, sign into Bitly and click Create Bitlink.

Click Create Bitlink.

Then paste in the link you want to share, add a relevant title, and customize the link so it’s easy to remember.

Paste and customize a relevant link.

Now share the link on Snapchat and ask your audience to screenshot it.

Share the link on Snapchat.

To measure traffic, search for the link in Bitly.

Use Bitly to measure Snapchat link performance.

Conclusion

Using Snapchat effectively will help you build exposure, credibility, and trust with your audience.

What do you think? Have you implemented a Snapchat plan? What are your thoughts and tips? Please let us know in the comments below!

Tips on four steps you can take to get your business started on Snapchat.